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The slaves who serve us

There are hidden bills to pay for the vast supply lines that build the factories and produce the goods that move beyond the reach of the local workers. Those are shipped around the world so we might walk into a store, pick that needful thing up in our hands while casually wondering 'Is it worth it?'

In this case, the expenditure was Chorvorn's arm.

Torn off, right up to her small shoulder.

More than a week ago now, the 14-year-old girl, working in a Cambodian brick factory caught her arm in the wheel on a machine that pounds clay into building blocks.

This, after workers -- many of them as young or younger than Chorvorn -- spent days stomping the mud with bare feet. Bricks are the foundation of development, and go into building the factories that lead to mountains of T-shirts and pants sold in trendy stores in Canada, and the shrimp in our frozen foods.

But there are very fragile points along the supply chain.

Chorvorn's sleeve became caught in the spinning wheel. The machines are so loud her screams would have paled in comparison.

On this day, Chorvorn is being wheeled into an operating room. She will not be able to get another adequate job and the disability may stop her from marrying anyone -- a fate that will make her an outcast.

Her family, we're told, is not at the hospital, though her grandmother, Savy, tells us the child is cared for.

The older woman, guarded as neighbours inch closer to listen in, says no one is to blame for the mutilation.

Terrible things just happen to some so young.

QMI Agency has travelled into the bush for this interview, and throughout factories, treatment centres, clinics and schools in Cambodia and Thailand, while shadowing child labour and human trafficking experts from World Vision Canada.

The relief, development and advocacy organization is gathering information as it kicks off a three-year campaign, Help Wanted: End Child Slavery, aimed at stopping the worst forms of child labour (endchildslavery.ca).

It comes just as Canada this past week announced a federal Action Plan to Combat Human Trafficking.

Protecting the most vulnerable people on earth was an election promise by the federal Conservatives.

Our nation previously took a lead role on commitments to champion child and maternal health. However experts say despite our signature on an international agreement to fight trafficking, we are now having to play catch-up to countries such as the U.S. and Australia in making a priority of banning modern slavery.

Human trafficking only became a Canadian Criminal Code offence in 2005. And the inhuman crime happens more than Canadians would think, right inside our borders.

But it's here in the Mekong Sub region that winds through Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand, Vietnam and the Yunnan Province of China, where perhaps the greatest numbers are dealt as stock.

In 2005, an estimated 9.45 million people were living in forced labour in the Asian Pacific Region, and as many as half could be children.

While Canadians often equate human trafficking with the sex trade, nine out of 10 cases involve inhuman labour practices -- from being abducted onto fishing boats in Thailand, put under the thumbs of gangs to beg in Vietnam, transported to Saudi Arabia for domestic work or sold off as wives to rural men in China.

There's no evidence Chorvorn was a victim of trafficking, though she is certainly an example of child labour gone horribly wrong.

Normally, after such an accident, she would have likely been discarded. But advocates, including World Vision, lobbied for the brick company to continue to pay her a modest sum.

But she is only 14 years old, facing a whole life in front of her. And beyond the guarded words of her grandmother, the older woman acknowledges something that's obvious: The young girl isn't interested in a payment. She's not interested in fault. And she's not interested in whether Canadians understand the links that lead from factories overseas to consumer decisions and new government action in our own country.

"She just wants her arm back," says the grandmother.

She wants, she continues, to be the young girl she was before.

And she has no understanding her arm was a bill paid along a vast supply line.

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POIPET, Cambodia -- In the border land, there seems to be two clear but hard choices.

Either you somehow make your way from Cambodia to the promised land of Thailand to scratch out a better life through hard work, or you cross over into a brutal new world of forced labour and slavery.

Though both options begin with the same rush of desperation.

Around the world, migrants filter from one jurisdiction to another, hoping something better will come their way tomorrow.

All combined, those who find themselves in developed countries -- including Canada -- ship back more than $300 billion to their families in developing nations.

Others are working in developing countries that have a few more opportunities than where they're from, which is the case of Cambodians dreaming of Thailand.

But a slowdown in the global economy has increased the stakes and also the risks for more than 100 million migrant workers worldwide.

Here on the impoverished divide between Cambodia and Thailand -- distastefully defined by a strip of gaudy casinos built in a free-for-all no-man's zone teetering between the two borders -- thousands of transient workers jump constantly back and forth across the line.

Some go the legal route, and line up at the gates -- or physically push huge overloaded carts of goods into Thailand past guards.

Others trek through the dense jungle -- in some cases, finding a common currency with official patrols that should be guarding the line, rather than profiting from it.

Among the daily commuters here in Cambodia is an elderly grandmother, who morning and night makes her way to and from bitter work on the Thai sugar cane fields.

You haven't heard about the misery of need until you've walked in her footsteps through the thick bush that's 60 meters to the border.

Her husband is all but blind. Among the assorted children they have to support is their young granddaughter who is suspected of carrying HIV, which also killed both her parents.

The old woman is also sick, but must still work in hopes of somehow, some day, paying off a debt owed to the community. It's less than $200 for rice and land, but the family will likely be indebted for life.

Every day, she hopes for a better tomorrow for all her children -- though all are starting their journey already in debt.

Another man works for greener pastures as well.

He crossed over to Thailand in 2010, and found himself trafficked to a company that grows phak bung -- water morning glory used in stir fry meals. At times, he recalls, workers, under guard and brutalized, were forced to toil for 22 hours a day.

Last year, police raided the plant, and held him until he was eventually returned to the Cambodian side.

Today, sitting in his barren thatch hut -- rain knocking loud on the roof -- he looks older than his 46 years.

Because he still lives within reach of his traffickers, it's not safe to use his name.

And his mind, like his scarred body, is a patchwork of fragile parts.

It's unclear whether he was more mentally stable before his ordeal. All that's clear, according to government records, is his history as a forced labourer.

And as much as it is the desperate, it's often the weak and most vulnerable who are the first to be trapped across borderlines.

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PATTAYA, Thailand -- A girl sits on a bench, selling small fragile birds.

They are symbols of good luck and once bought by tourists or locals. They are intended to be set free from their grimy cages, though some would keep the birds for amusement.

He has sidestepped the usual hunting ground around Pattaya Walking Street -- home to neon discos, go-go bars, lousy music, sex shows and hundreds of prostitutes who dwell bare shoulder to bare shoulder under the shadows of palm trees by the moonlit beach -- to set his sights on the 15-year-old bird seller.

He tells her in Thai that if she comes with him, and if she has a baby with him, he will look after them both.

But the girl is smarter than that. Smarter than many. Because she has been through this often -- mostly with Russian and Thai men, but also with those who speak English.

She knows he would not stay around.

She fears contracting disease.

And she worries about her dignity.

We have withheld her name here, to protect her further.

She tells the story - and about the many times tourists have propositioned her -- in the shadow of the Nhong Tai Buddhist temple. The monks in their robes and the thunder of a bell do not soften the uncomfortable images she describes.

When people think of sex tourism, they only have a vague idea of the horrors faced by more than a million exploited children in the global trade -- as well as those who must resist the outstretched clutches.

Inside a secured Phnom Penh Trauma Recovery Project, ringed by barbed wire, another 15-year-old, clutching a stuffed animal, tells her story of selling her virginity to a stranger for $200.

"I did not dare to dream," she says of the person she was before being rescued by local authorities and helped by World Vision officials in Cambodia.

She explains that she did not want to have sex, including later with a foreigner, but she overheard threats by those her parents owed money to.

"That they would take the roof from our house," she recalls.

If her voice could become any smaller, it would go unheard.

A 17-year-old boy in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, was rescued last year by anti-trafficking and juvenile protection police after years of being raped by a Swedish man, who plied him with drugs.

As warm rain falls near the banks of the dark waters of the Tonle Sape River, the boy talks about the man who kept him as a sex slave, saying: "I'm glad he's in jail."

As he speaks, local children practise kickboxing with ripped fabric as gloves. They're tough but they're still children.

RCMP spokesman Laurence Trottier says the trend of Canadians travelling abroad to take part in child sex crimes is growing, though of seven cases the force has laid charges in, none have involved human trafficking.

And the force rejects an often heard refrain that child sex tourism is a crime of opportunity.

This defies logic, says Trottier.

"One has to ask himself (or) herself, 'if I travel overseas and someone offers me the opportunity to engage in sexual activity with an 11-year-old child, would I take it?' The answer is: 'Of course not,'"

But as sure as the teenage girl will be out selling her good-luck birds today, she will probably have to run a new gauntlet of abusers hoping to buy a child.

We've made contact with him through an organization that works to stop human trafficking and child labour among the hundreds of largely fishing-related factories that rise up all around this seaport.

We're not using his name, for fear of reprisals.

Down most laneways and inside most buildings, someone is trying to find a way to make money by selling something or someone.

To those in neighbouring countries, including Cambodia, this is where dreams can come true.

Many companies and brokers, who find the migrant workers, are legitimate. More than a few are not. The balance and relationships between right and wrong is sometimes as thin as fishing twine.

For 17 years, M worked all sides of the equation.

He's been a trafficker and a police snitch. He even hunted down workers when they managed to escape the grips of an unscrupulous and enslaving boss.

For M, the road to catching humans began when a factory owner at a plant noticed his loyalty and work ethic.

"Find more like you," M was told, agreeing many migrant workers are lazy and don't want to work hard.

So it was up to M -- an animated talker with a quick grin -- to scare them into doing their part.

And when he searched for new blood, it would often be the young.

The minimum age for the trafficker was around 12 years old.

"The factory doesn't want old -- they want young because of the attitudes," he says, explaining children do as they're told.

He would also deal in foreign girls with small figures -- because they looked like Thai women and would cause less suspicion.

But when they managed to run away, M would become -- as he explains -- "the gangster", tracking them down to make sure they were returned to pay off the original $500 debt incurred when they were first hired. Along with a 20% additional fee for having to find them again. It was all so calculating.

And if they didn't come back?

The men would be beaten. And he would make an offer to some of the women.

They could sleep with him to reduce or strike off the debt.

He also worked the local police, becoming an informant on drug matters. Because of that, he says, he was allowed to carry handcuffs and a gun, which made the job of being a gangster that much easier.

Today, he works to try help migrant workers free themselves from bondage.

Which is made easier by his past, he insists, because he knows all the angles and all the schemes and all the ways a man's hands can get very dirty.

- Thane Burnett

FACTBOX

Trafficking by the numbers -- home and abroad:

- June 6, 2012 - The feds announce the National Action Plan to Combat Human Trafficking.

- $25 million over four years. The cost of the plan.

- 9 years sentence handed to Ferenc Domotor in April in Canada's largest human trafficking case.

- 4.5 years - The actual time he will serve because of time already served and for pleading guilty in Hamilton, Ont.

- 19 victims originally from Hungary, none of whom spoke English, were forced to work for table scraps and little or no pay.

- 1 - It was the first successful conviction for foreign victims trafficked in Canada.

- 1 - It was also the first successful forced labour case.

- 2005 - the year the federal government added human trafficking to the criminal code.

- 23 cases in Canada in which human trafficking charges were laid and the accused have been convicted of human trafficking or related charges.

- 56 victims have been saved from the hands of traffickers in Canada.

- 59 - The number of human trafficking cases currently before Canadian courts, involving 98 individuals accused of human trafficking.

- 147 - The number of victims involved in those cases.

- 1 in 10 - The number of sex trade cases compared to labour cases in global human trafficking.

- 1.2 million children - the number trafficked each year for labour and sexual exploitation around the globe.